Understanding the rules so you can use them to your advantage

Love them or hate them, rules are inescapable. As individuals we are subject to rules created and enforced by others, and as managers and leaders we subject others to the rules we create (or that have been given us from "above"). When interacting with the rules, we have the choice to either obey or rebel, to follow the rules or to break them. Of course, the situation is a bit more nuanced than a simple binary choice.

Possibility: In this course we will explore the role of rules in our daily work and our relationship to them, as both individuals and as leaders, so that we can better understand how we can use rules to achieve the outcomes and success we desire. Throughout the course we will use both real and fictional situations involving rules of all kinds, from the good and helpful to the stupid and generally ignored, and compare them with our own situations and encounters with rules. We will use the following concepts as a guide for the course.

• Read the Manual - Learn the rules, why they exist, and what they are meant to achieve
• Imagine the consequences, imagine the possibilities - Understand what happens when you don’t follow the rules, and what happens when you do
• Always follow the rules, except when you shouldn't - OR - Never follow the rules, except when you should
• Rules are meant to be changed - If a rule needs to be changed, change it

Participants: This course is for you if:

• You are a rule follower who would like to learn how to understand when you should break the rules and how to go about it
• You are a rule breaker who would like to learn how to understand that sometimes following the rule is the best course of action, no matter how much you really want to break it
• You are a rule maker who wants to gain a better understanding of why people break your rules and how to create and apply rules that people will want to follow

Parameters: I am still developing this course, working out some details. I’m looking at this being a 6-week course, meeting for 60-90 minutes each week. This will give us a chance to explore the nature of rules in general, spend some time on each of the four concepts described above, and then some time to pull it all together into something we can each use going forward.

Passion: My name is gBRETT miller (the "g" is silent). I am a possibilitarian, a systems engineer and service designer whose happy place is in the white space between disciplines, where possibility lives. I can’t help seeing how everything is connected, and how lessons and experience from one domain can be leveraged in others. I am fascinated by the way in which different people interpret the same rule or standard.

I have been intrigued, obsessed almost, by rules for as long as I can remember. As a kid, I can remember my frustration with the lack of consistent rules in the spelling and pronunciation of words in English, and how much fun I had diagramming sentences and doing math problems for fun, just to see when the rules would break. My teachers either loved me for it, or hated me for it.